Good. I hope they lose everything
Its a really great market for picking up talent if your company isn’t currently suffering AI psychosis. You don’t have to use talent scouts or anything else expensive, your competitors are just laying off their top engineers who previously you had no chance of getting and they aren’t even doing it out of necessity.
Apparently TeamSystem here in Europe is citing AI among the reasons for reducing its weekly working hours from 36 to 32, without change to the employees salary.
So you get Friday off and get paid the same. That’s how technological progress is supposed to work.
It’s been shown many times that working 4 days a week can have same work output at 5 days.
So they will probably get the same output. But not because of AI.
ITT ‘get hired back for more’.
That wasn’t the goal, it was always hire someone else for less later while making this quarters financials look good and workers more desperate and fungible. Sucks for long term viability and institutional knowledge, but shareholders are happy now, C-suite gets bonuses, AI is just this years excuse. Just late stage capitalism working as expected.
Right, know of at least one new grad that was looking for a job for a bit and after some months got hired for some company leveraging LLMs and was mentioning how they were on the companies “top AI users!”, which managers liked. The only thing I could think of was how they would be seen as a scapegoat once the costs started to increase and they could find themselves with the people already looking for a job with more experience due to “AI” lay offs.
Insert world smallest violin
🎻
E: also happy cake day!
If a company lays someone off in favor of AI, employees should ask for at LEAST a 20% bump to come back… make it fucking painful for them.
Also, restore my original hire date to keep seniority/extra vacation/pension/etc.
Instead they will be offered the same role with a 20-50% pay cut due to market conditions, and it will be 100% in person instead of fully remote or hybrid as it was just five years ago.
If I were offered that deal I’d politely tell them to go fuck themselves with a cactus.
I haven’t had to report to an office for more than a pizza party since 2011, I have no intention of starting now.
I get it, and that’s why they would just hire the next guy on the street who would gladly take the money for the same job because they have been mostly unemployed for XX months/years.
Hundreds of thousands of layoffs and more and more declining QOL, benefits and pay. Just how it is today unless you are in one of the trending AI jobs - which will dry up and pay a fraction of what they used to before too long.
A while back I worked for a company that liked to pull the “lets lay people off right before earnings reports to make the stockholders happy” and then call them back after the shareholders meetings…
They found, after a few cycles of this, that when they did that, the top 30% of employees laid off would have already found other jobs by the time they were recalled… They also found that a few cycles of culling the top 30% means after a while your entire workforce is largely worthless, add to the fact that now you have to hire new people and train them…it ended up costing more money than it made them… (but they didn’t care, because the share value boost was all they wanted, so they could personally sell high after the bump and enrich themselves…
I work for a company now that values and celebrates employees with long tenures… They see it as a sign of health in the company (which it is) and celebrate the number of 10+ year veterans employed by them…
I got lucky finding this place. :)
20 is nothing for that. I’d ask for 50, especially if it was going from former FTE to contract.
Oh I wouldn’t even entertain a contract position…
I had this while back…I was working for company doing DR/Replication scripting…I was about 2/3 way through the job and they decided that “they could finish the job themselves” and graciously released me from my contract…
They called me back about 2 weeks later, at which point I quoted them 400% of my original rate, payable in advance, to finish the work. ;-) They were fucking LIVID…
Of course, they didn’t re-book me, but the rumor mill told me that they brought it in about a year behind schedule and at about 2x the budget they had allocated…
Helpful hint - do documentation LAST. If they fire you before it’s done, they get SQUAT. I didn’t even have passwords written down for them.
Generally consultants on short-medium length contracts cost 3-5x hourly rate of FTEs, for long-term contracts it’s usually around 2x, at least in the industries I’ve worked in. You’d be low balling yourself by only asking for a 50% increase for contract work.
@sanitation 你说的「后悔」让我想到一个常见的误区：很多公司算账只算「裁员省下的工资」，但忽略了「AI 替代后的隐形成本」。比如一个做 API 管理平台的团队，裁掉了 10 个支持工程师后，发现 AI 客服的误差率导致客户流失增加了 12%，而每个客户的 LTV 是 $15k——这意味着他们每月多流失 $180k，远超省下的工资。你这边有没有看到哪些公司是因为这种「短视算账」吃亏的？我们之前做过一个简单的 ROI 模型 ，可以对照一下。
This is not new. Went through the same thing when employers were offshoring development to low wage countries. Some people in the management chain were so up on that, they joked we were all going to get fired. But I had seen the code. It wasn’t long before they were coming to me to get it fixed because it was their ass if they couldn’t get it sorted. My superpower was untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code.
At a previous employer they had actually good intentions with offshoring. Senior developers tended to be bound with maintenace of projects they had worked on over the years and the ranks couldn’t be filled up fast enough to take over. Management wanted the most experienced developers to be availlable for new projects, so they decided to offshore some of the legacy maintenance to India. Didn’t work out, though. The Indian company would throw ten people at things one of us would’ve done and they still managed to mess things up in major ways. My favorite memory is when they replaced a for loop with an if statement. Now, one could argue, that an if statement without an else branch is a special case of a for loop with one iteration … but, this was not that 😅 Seniors ended up spending even more time on legacy projects to fix the crap the Indians did.
We bought the hype machine and got giant boners for ruining our employees lives by suddenly laying them off, but now we’re starting to see maybe that wasn’t as super smart as we told ourselves it was.
So long, meat bags!
…
Hello, meat bags!
Fuck 'em. I hope all the people they fired got pay raises elsewhere and will never come back.
Yeah, I’m sure the customers weren’t happy either when their friendly, helpful PoC was suddenly replaced with a clanker that has the intellect of a rotten potato, likely at a time when everyone was still struggling to hold shit together as it was.
